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The Geological Society offers grades of membership for every stage of your career, from student to retirement. Find out about the benefits of membership, and how we can help you achieve and maintain Chartered status.

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The Geological Society of London is the UK national society for geoscience, providing support to over 11,500 members in the UK and overseas. Founded in 1807, we are the oldest geological society in the world.

2019 at the Geological Society is the themed Year of Carbon!

Following on from our 2018 themed Year of Resources, in 2019 we will be looking at carbon, one of the most important elements on our planet.

Carbon is of critical importance in:

The oceans and atmosphere where it has important consequences for the global climate system.

Complex organic molecules that led to life on Earth.

Carbon-based energy resources which remain of critical importance as both a source of energy but also in planning for a future carbon-neutral society.

Understanding the carbon budget of our planet over long timescales, which requires quantification of the cycling of carbon between surface reservoirs and Earth’s deep interior.

Carbon is also at the heart of a number of important societal challenges. The rapid increase in atmospheric CO2, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time, and will occupy generations to come. Carbon-based fuels, however, remain essential for our economy, transport, communications and everyday life and petroleum geoscience develops innovation in exploration, in extraction and in mitigating emissions.

In the future, however, a move to carbon-neutral fuels and energy sources is unavoidable, and is the focus of much research, including studies in the field of carbon sequestration.

Throughout 2019 the Society will explore the geoscience of carbon through research conferences, lectures, our education programme and other activities.

Conferences and Meeting Programme

We will be running a number of carbon-themed conferences through 2019 on a wide variety of research focussed topics as well as more applied and societal challenge-led areas.

Bryan Lovell Meeting: Role of geological science in the decarbonisation of power production, heat, transport and industry

21-23 January 2019

The aim of the Bryan Lovell meetings is to focus on an area of geoscience relevant to major societal challenges as outlined in the Society’s Geology for Society report. To chime with the Year of Carbon, the 2019 Bryan Lovell meeting will focus on decarbonising the energy sector and the areas that will involve the subsurface and require geoscience expertise.

The programme will cover geoscience as it relates to the following areas:

battery technologies for electric vehicles

geothermal power

the civil nuclear program and geological disposal of radioactive waste